The document discusses different technologies for handling big data: MapReduce, MPP analytical databases, and in-memory data fabrics. It then describes a real-life project involving sensor data that is growing rapidly. The requirements are for structured analytics on the data in near real-time. Vertica, an MPP database, is proposed as the solution since it can handle the volumes of structured time-series data, perform analytics using SQL, and scale to meet future growth needs. R analytics would also be integrated as user-defined functions running on the Vertica cluster.